There’s one thing that could be said about my life: it’s creative. In many aspects. For example, I am now a confirmed PhD candidate at the University of Newcastle Australia (UON), and my research is “Rhythmic Dialogues: Latin Dance as a Practice of Connection, Belonging & Community”. Yes, I will be a Doctor of Philosophy in… Latin Dance?! My discipline is actually human geography. It took me about a year to read 100 books and articles to understand what that meant, something to do with researching the relationships between humans and the places where they are, and how they feel and are affected by these places and spaces.

Then, as part of my scholarship pathway, I had to complete an “industry internship”, with future employment after the PhD being the main goal of this requirement. I had a few prospects, I did a few interviews before making a choice.

Funny enough, I wasn’t excited by the ballet organisation or the dance journal options, as prestigious and interesting as they were. But when I ended up in a coffee shop talking to Katherine McLean, the director of Hunter Writers’ Centre, she told me about this new pilot program and instantly I was at the edge of my seat, almost salivating, saying, ‘Yes! I will work hard for free for you! Just let me be involved in this!’ And the CrossLit Pilot Program was born.

I am facilitating a session in CrossLit, which gives me the opportunity to be as creative as possible, bringing writing into conversation with other artforms and embodied practices:

Cross-train
Borrow methods from other genres and artforms. Move between poetry and prose, fiction and essay, text and image, or try montage from film, repetition from music, and collage from visual art. Each session takes a compositional idea from somewhere else and pushes it through language. Break habitual patterns, make hybrid forms and find structures, rhythms and ways of making meaning that live outside your usual form.

For writers who want to take creative risks and discover new ways of shaping language and meaning. I am becoming the full time creative that the last 23 years in Australia have been about!

I knew that CrossLit had to be created, I am happy to be involved in bringing it to life! I can’t wait to see how many writers will get involved, how much writing, and the creativity that will abound from it!